DEBUT ALBUM COMING OUT IN SEPTEMBER
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Puerto Plata is an 83 year old veteran of the guitar tradition of the Dominican Republic, adept in all its many forms - bolero, merengue, ranchera, mangulina, bachata - and above all, son. Son is a style which is most often associated with Cuba, and soneros all over Latin America owe a tremendous debt to great Cuban groups like El Trio Matamoros, El Septeto Nacional, Los Compadres and Antonio MachÃn. Nevertheless, the Dominican Republic is home to an unbroken native son tradition, and José Cobles has personally lived a good part of its history. He offers us a taste of the living music of the great soneros, that only a contemporary of theirs could give us, yet his interpretations of classic sones and boleros have a particularly Dominican flavor. When he plays merengue, he takes us back to a time before the dominance of saxophone and accordion, when son, merengue, guaracha and música jibara were much closer in their nature, being merely different regional variations of the same Afro-Iberian fusion.
Born in the resort town of Puerto Plata, in 1923, Cobles combines the wisdom of an elder statesman with an astounding vigor and charisma that one would expect of a much younger man. His three uncles were musicians, and he recalls Sundays spent at their house in the presence of such legends of Dominican music as composer Juan Lockward and singer Eduardo Brito. His mother died when he was young, and upon the death of his grandmother, when he was 16, he went to work as a carpenter for the United Fruit Company. His work took him to Manzanillo, to Panama, and finally led him to settle in Santiago (in the Dominican Republic) at the age of 27. There, because of his hometown, he was nicknamed "Puerto Plata". It was when he was living in Manzanillo that he began to save pennies in a shoe box until he was able to buy his first guitar for 20 Dominican pesos. He was 24 years old - leaving him a scant 56 years of practice to bring his mastery to its current level!
For more info visit www.iasorecords.com
